Editor?s note: Portions of the following article should have been credited to the Christian Science Monitor. Duplicated passages resulted in a disciplinary action against the Bangor Daily News reporter for plagiarism. See article, “BDN reporter suspended for five days,” published on 4/21/2007 for more detail.

The Case of the Missing Honeybees” sounds like a fun children’s story, but in reality it is a national crisis that could have far-reaching implications for the country’s food supply. Every third bite of food consumed is pollinated by bees, and they are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, killed by an unknown disease.

“This is very, very scary,” Marc Plaisted of Pittston said Thursday.

Plaisted has raised honeybees for 20 years and supplies hives to a dozen Maine farmers in the Kennebec Valley for pollination.

“We aren’t seeing this disease here yet, but I’m very concerned about the migratory bees that are brought into Maine,” he said. “Who knows what diseases they are bringing in here? If this disease is not here by the end of summer, I’d be very surprised.”

Maine’s blueberry crop requires about 50,000 beehives for pollination, with most of the hives trucked in from other states.

Spencer Allen of Allen’s Wild Maine Blueberries in Blue Hill said he usually imports about 1,200 hives for the 800 acres his business harvests. He said he spoke to his bee wrangler, who keeps his bees in Florida and Pennsylvania, and all looks well for now. Because of the national shortage of the honeybee pollinators, however, Allen said the price he will pay has jumped about $20 per hive – up to $70 for each hive placed in a field.

“That adds up with 1,200 hives,” he said. The hives are usually put in the fields around May 10-15.

Plaisted said he heard that by the time mid-May rolls around, the price could be $90 a hive or more.

“Many migratory bee keepers are being lured to California, where almond growers are paying as much as $200 a hive,” he said.

Nat Lindquist of Jasper Wyman and Sons of Milbridge, one of the state’s largest blueberry businesses, said he will import 10,000 hives from seven beekeepers. Lindquist said he began monitoring the bee kill last fall when his largest supplier began reporting empty hives in Pennsylvania.

That beekeeper is David Hackenberg, who lost more than a million bees. The bees in 2,000 of his 2,900 hives have disappeared – a 60 percent loss. Hackenberg said he had never seen so many deserted hives, which were also left alone by other predator insects.

“He has assured us that we will have plenty of bees,” Lindquist said. “We also want strong hives, and he has assured us of that as well.”

Commercial beekeepers in 26 states are reporting losses of between 50 percent and 90 percent, and scientists are saying that the country’s food supply may be at risk if it loses its pollinators. Scientists are finding two times more pathogens than ever seen before in honeybees. The implication is that something has seriously damaged their immune systems, leaving the honeybees more vulnerable to disease than before.

Dubbed “autumn collapse,” “fall dwindle,” or “disappearing disease,” the loss of honeybees is so severe that the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture recently held hearings to gather information on what is officially called Colony Collapse Disorder.

CCD may be caused by a convergence of factors – mites, viruses, bee diseases, pesticides and other environmental stresses – which may have weakened bees’ immune systems but the cause of the die-offs has yet to be determined. CCD was first reported in Florida last fall and has spread throughout the country.

The missing-bee crisis could spell catastrophe to the food supply. While staple crops such as wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops – from blueberries and apples to cranberries and watermelons – rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollination. Bees help generate some $14 billion worth of produce.

Maine’s beekeepers won’t know for a few weeks precisely how their hives fared this past winter.

“April is the cruelest month,” said Bob Egan of Skowhegan. “My bees look good right now,” but when the honeybees start their spring cycle later this month, hive health will become more clear.

“Last fall we had a heck of a honey flow, and that caused swarming,” Egan said. He explained that with too much honey, the hives’ cells become full, and there is nowhere for the queen bee to lay her eggs.

“That means that we went into the winter with old bees,” Egan said. He kept adding empty combs to his hives last fall to help solve the problem.

“We’ll know [about hive health] in the next week or two when the bees starting moving out of the hive, seeking pussy willow pollen and water,” Egan said.

The shrinking number of the country’s so-called “pollination portfolio” is of more concern to many entomologists than is the die-off in commercial beehives.

On the East Coast, where a more ec ologically diverse farming landscape enhances diversity, studies have shown that wild pollinators were doing about 90 percent of the pollinating anyway, Neal Williams, an assistant professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, reported in recent research.

Meanwhile, a Canadian study suggested that if canola farmers leave 30 percent of their land fallow, they will increase their yields. Wild land provides habitat for native pollinators, improving pollination and increasing the number of seeds.

“If we cultivate all the land, we lose ecosystem services like pollination,” Lora Morandin, lead author on the study, stated in her research. “Healthy, sustainable agricultural systems need to include natural land.”

Florida is a favorite wintering place for honeybees and was the first state to report the disease.

Jerry Hayes, chief apiarist of the Florida Department of Agriculture, said recently: “My question is: Are honeybees the canary in the coal mine? Are honeybees trying to tell us something that we humans should be paying more attention to?”